


coming home

by weirdoqueen



Category: Borderlands, Mass Effect, borderlands 2 - Fandom
Genre: Blindfolds, Crossover, F/F, F/M, Fisting, High School AU, Teacher/Student, dubcon, fem dom
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-27
Updated: 2013-06-27
Packaged: 2017-12-16 07:31:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 6
Words: 7,096
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/859519
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/weirdoqueen/pseuds/weirdoqueen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Following Handsome Jack in his role as Principal of Hyperion High, unaware of his daughter’s skill at manipulating her peers, and of her relationship with the programming prodigy and blossoming vixen Carmen Shepard.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

He was from the planet of Pandora, a failed colony whose population had largely gone insane and was exiled to spend the last of their days marooned on that giant rock, a place that was simultaneously never spoken of yet universally known as hell come to life. He was nothing to be trifled with, he spoke with a smile as sweet as castor oil, and those who spoke against him had an unfortunate inclination for sudden disappearances.

He was watching her again.  
Of course, that had never been unusual.  
She’d grown used to it, and why shouldn’t she? She’d started it, after all. It was her tight and teasing outfits, her smirks and cocked brows, her lidded gazes and the accidental touching.  
At least, that’s what he believed, and that’s what he was prepared to tell anyone should he ever get caught.  
Not that such a thing would ever happen, however. He was the principal of Providence High, a small and elite school on the Alliance colony of Mindoir. He was the one to whom everyone had to answer, he was the one in charge of the teachers’ next paychecks.  
And yet here he was, his eyes hungrily roaming the body of a bronze-skinned seventeen-year-old who was entirely too developed for her age, both in body and mind.  
It was after school hours, and she was writing code on the digital whiteboards because she didn’t quite understand binary search trees.  
Or, she said so anyway. And her homework proved it, since she never got more than 30% on any given assignment, although her exams were always perfect. Her programming teacher had accused her of cheating on her first test, and so she’d been sent to the principal’s office.  
And so, they’d met.

He was seated at his desk, elbows propped up and hands steepled, intently studying his thumbnails for lack of anything better to do while he waited, pointedly ignoring the constant pinging of new and old unread messages that resounded from his data terminal.  
“Your name is Shepard, right?” he’d asked her as she strut into the room and plopped down into the seat in front of his desk, hooking her knee over the armrest like she owned the place. With trousers as tight as hers, he’d briefly—but graphically—wondered how she’d managed that.  
“Carmen,” she replied, in a voice so naturally sultry it caught him off guard. He could feel her eyes on the mask that was bolted to his face. No one had ever been so bold in staring at it before, and he wasn’t entirely sure how he felt about that. He figured he admired the gesture to some extent, but back home on Pandora, he often ended up killing the things he’d once admired.  
He often ended up killing no matter what, actually.  
He brushed off the feeling, deciding he’d deal with it later.  
“Well then, Carmen, my name”—he tapped the name plate in from of him—“is Principal Smith.”  
She snorted. “Who uses Smith anymore?”  
He smiled, choosing to ignore her comment. Pandora had no need for family names because family was nothing more than a convenient arrangement of six letters, so when he’d emigrated he’d had to take on a name. “Smith” was simple, it took no thought, and he really didn’t care how many people wondered at it, as long as he could do away with those who actually questioned it.  
“Now, ‘principal’ is just my title,” he continued, “but I like to think of myself as more of a princi-pal.” She smirked, he chose not to notice. “You’ve been brought to me with the accusation of cheating. Your teacher says you’ve done horribly on all your homework, and you refused tutoring, but you managed a total of 110 out of 100 points on the exam. Care to explain yourself?”  
She crossed her legs, resting her ankle on a knee, and shrugged one shoulder. “You’re a programmer, right, Smith?”  
He was cautious. “ _Principal_ Smith. And yes, I am. Why?”  
“Well, the exam was on linked lists. We were asked to write a circular list on the exam. Would you like me to do that for you now?”  
He raised a brow. “If you cheated, you could have memorized the answers.”  
She let out a short laugh. “I don’t have a photographic memory, and if I’d cheated, why the hell would I care enough to keep the answer in my head? Here, just pass me a damn datapad.”  
“Carmen, you’re not going to prove anything by doing th—hey!”  
She’d snatched a datapad from atop a pile of papers, but by the time he’d gotten it back, the words in the document were arranging themselves, alphabetizing themselves, a pair at a time.  
He was quiet as he watched the words move.  
“…Bubble sort.” He sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose—of the mask’s nose. “Get the hell out of here before I change my mind.”

And so the year continued. She was still sent to his office for the next few exams, but she only insisted she hadn’t cheated, and was immediately sent back out. Her teacher begged to let him help her, but she continued to refuse. Eventually, however, she was so irritated by his pestering that she did agree to tutoring—but only if she could choose the tutor.  
“I still don’t get it, Smith,” she insisted, staring at the code in front of her. “The damn thing’s just not working.”  
“Please, Carmen, how many times have I asked you to call me Jack?” he crooned. “You just forgot to initialize a variable here, and you’re missing a semi-colon. Here, I’ll do it.” He stood behind her, and wrote in the changes. The board took a moment to register the adjustments and began to recompile the program.  
She was used to him being behind her. It was a game they played, a hint of foreplay: he always stood a bit closer to her than before, and she arched her back a little bit more.  
He would do it this time, though. He’d finally get his hands on her, he’d finally tear her out of her stupid shirt and dig his nails into her damned hips and he’d jam into her, dry or otherwise.  
But as he reached for her, she moved away, and he was suddenly acutely aware of a dull pain in his lower abdomen, and a seething anger whose red fingers began to claw through his throat.  
“It’s still not working,” she mused. She studied the code, then let out a sound of discovery. “Missing parenthesis,” she said. She wrote in the absent symbol and turned around; upon seeing him, however, her smile faded—but did not fall.  
“Principal Smith!” Her voice was initially tinged with worry, but that faded as well, to something much more—  
“Are you all right?”  
… _promising._  
There was heat visible in his neck and his ears, his hairline—but that mask of his remained cool and pristine, a veneer of everlasting calm. His hand remained where it was when he’d tried to take her and twist her between his fingers, collapse her inside his palms. It was poetic, really, how he froze and gnarled and boiled over with venom when he risked having his goals removed from attainment.  
She reached out her own hand, a hesitant thing, a flower petal unfolding. Just as her fingertips brushed the painted and chiseled jaw of his mask, he sprung back to life, his own outreached claw gripping her forearm and slamming it against the display behind her. His following movements were more fluid, however, as he braced a hand on her waist and guided her backwards. She was close enough to his height that he could dip his head and bury his nose in her cleavage, then skimming back up against her neck as one hand buried itself into her trousers and clutched at her groin. His hand squeezed harder for every inch of flesh his mask felt, his fury rising as he realized how damned much he missed feeling someone else’s skin on his cheeks.  
He felt her hips shifting, and mistook it for arousal, but instead she removed his hands from her clothing, gripping him at his wrists, and cleared her throat. His hands twitched, but he lifted his mouth from her windpipe and looked at her, something not unlike disdain settling within his mismatched eyes.  
“Relax,” she said softly, and while he let out a breath and his shoulders did fall, the tightness within him only grew. She let go of his wrists and he let them drop to his sides. A brief smile alighted upon her lips, but then she raised her hand and ran fingertips through his hair. As response, he promptly plastered a hand onto her ass. He laughed at the look she gave him, then said, “You touch me, I touch you. It’s only fair, pumpkin.” She raised a brow but didn’t protest; instead, she placed her other hand on his chest and he brought his other hand to her rear, pressing her hips against his.  
She had both hands on his chest, then, but he only squeezed her harder. “Don’t think I’ll be quite done here for a while,” he muttered, giving her a smack.  
But his pectorals tensed beneath her touch. All of him was tense. It seemed he wanted to be the only one doing the touching.  
“If you let go of me,” she tried, “I promise I’ll make up for it.”  
He mulled this over. “Pinky swear?”  
She rolled her eyes and shoved a hand down his pants. “Sure.”  
But instead of releasing her, his hands slid up her body, tangling in her hair as they came to rest heavily on her collarbone. “Then get to it, sweetheart.”  
So she lowered to her knees, hands at the tops of his thighs, her thumbs framing either side of his groin. His hands knotted in her hair as she unzipped him and stroked him through his underclothes, his hips pulling towards her.  
“Come on, come on already,” he muttered, and she obliged somewhat and finally skin met skin as she pulled out his member and slid her palm along its length, the heat of the friction sending shivers through his tailbone.  
But just as he was stiff enough to handle in her mouth, just as the tip of her tongue pressed against the vein visible on his shaft, she stopped.  
“Oh!” she exclaimed, “it’s getting late, and I’m supposed to cook dinner tonight.”  
As he uttered a bewildered and disappointed and furious “What?” she popped back to her feet, gathered her things, and yelled out a “See you, Smith!” as she left the room.  
He flexed his hands, still tinged with the scent and texture of her dark hair, and let out a long, slow breath through his nose, the tendons in his neck slowly relaxing.  
She was indeed a handful.


	2. Chapter 2

He had a daughter named Angel.  
She was quiet, and a little bit shy because he’d raised her that way. But she was still fierce—a gift she’d inherited from her mother, one that her father simultaneously loved and loathed and feared, a trait that he did his best to squander in her youth so that she would be compliant and proper and everything he needed his little girl to be. But she had her mother’s wits, too, and they were all the more deadly inside the mind of a sixteen-year-old who’d learned to simultaneously spurn and revere her father.   
She sat in her calculus class, entirely nondescript in a large faded hoodie and second hand jeans. She idly chewed on the inside of her cheek, looking around at the rest of the classroom, watching as her classmates scribbled furiously on their exams. Angel’s teacher made no comment—by now he was used to the process; she’d finish her exam within the first ten minutes, then quietly wait for someone else to hand in their exam first before she slipped to the front of the room and did the same.   
So there she sat, twiddling her thumbs as she tried to match the pair of panties she’d found in her laundry last night to any number of girls whom she’d recently entertained.  
Or, to be more precise, who had entertained her.  
She’d made little progress when the bell rang.  
The rest of her day progressed similarly. She finished her work early, or didn’t pay attention to lecture because she’d already memorized the textbook at the beginning of the year. She’d spend the rest of class listening to songs she’d get stuck in her head, or making up mind games for herself, or staring out the window. The only time of day during which she was actually involved in her surroundings was her programming course.  
Angel had always been fascinated with technology, and she’d always had a gift for using and manipulating it, but Jack had never been one to foster his daughter’s interests and talents, so her skills had been left to wilt.   
Though she had the ability to skip ahead to a class usually reserved for senior students, Angel resigned herself to stay in a course juniors took.   
She had found a distraction. To distract Angel was a significant talent indeed, she told herself, but Angel’s distractions were more accurately categorized as ‘obsessions’.  
For as long as she could remember, she’d never felt quite herself around members of the opposite sex; perhaps that was her father’s doing, his endless warnings of how some sexual assault that had been on the news could and _would_ happen to her if she wasn’t careful, if she let one of those greedy little animals get his grubby little hands on her. She had been quite young at the time, not even ten years, but she’d asked, “So why did mommy let you marry her?”  
“Because I’m not like that, sweetie,” he told her, kissing the top of her head, and even at such a young age, that answer didn’t sit well with her.  
Since her youth, she’d befriended one or two girls, bright and bubbly creatures that most people thought wouldn’t get along with her; they laughed loudly and had pigtails wore short skirts and took whatever they were fed—but Angel taught them that they need not consume what they were given.  
Of course, when the time came and when they were old enough, she would help them eat what they were offered.  
She was the so-called satellite, the shy girl who hung around the popular girls, the girl who was meant to pick at the leftovers as if they were lionesses and she were a vulture.  
But if that were true, that only left the lions with blood dripping down their chins, and she would remain clean as the feathers that gleamed on her shoulders.  
She was the one in control. She was the one who told them how to seduce their targets, who taught them to take their pleasures only when they wanted to, that their bodies and minds were theirs and no one could change that.  
Angel had these girls on leashes—literally, at times—but she loved them as they worshipped her, and she would protect them should she need to.  
The girls laughed when she told them so, and she laughed along with them, but she wouldn’t tell them about Jack. For now, he was simply their principal, he was something to be mildly loathed out of tradition, not something of which to be horrified, something to be avoided at all costs. Oh, if only they knew.  
And then, there was her distraction.  
A girl—though she looked more a woman—who made a point to not meet Jack’s eye as she passed by, a girl who aced exams despite doing poorly in class, a girl whose gaze could go from murderous to melting in less than an instant.  
She was either fearless or incredibly stupid, and Angel’s toxic curiosity drove her to find out exactly which.

It started with a drop of a pen, a stuttered sorry as Carmen smiled and picked it up and handed it back, seeming not to notice when Angel’s fingertips brushed hers a bit more than was necessary.  
It started with a lingered gaze, Carmen’s sable hair piled up in a bun formed out of necessity rather than style as she furrowed her brow while debugging a program, Angel’s eyes trickling down the edge of the other girl’s neck.  
It started with knees brushing under a table at lunch, the knobs of their ankles touching, a hint of ankles sliding, an avoided glance and a scarlet blush.  
It started in the locker room when they skipped gym, hiding in one of the old and unused showers and switching clothing—attempting to, at least, before they realized that it wouldn’t work and they decided switching saliva would be much more productive.  
Carmen pushed her against the wall, and Angel liked that—it was something to work with, something she could whittle down and tame and use for her own gain. It was something she admired, something she loved, something she desired, something she loathed and feared and wanted to rip from Carmen’s loins—  
But that could wait, if it was needed at all.


	3. Chapter 3

Friday nights, he liked to go out.  
There were seedier parts of town about which only he and a few other lonely men knew, a place where he could drown his sorrows in some woman’s body and he didn’t even have to be sober for it.   
She’d try to play her part of course—he preferred humans, since asari reminded him of the alien beauty of Pandora—purr at him, slip a bit of clothing off of her shoulder, but he’d scowl and draw the back of his hand across her cheek and she’d fall onto the bed. He’d briefly miss the burn that liquor left in his throat as he undid his belt, he’d tangle a hand in her hair and press her face into the stiff sheets, he’d hike her dress up around her hips and let out a grunt as he guided himself into her ass, ignorant of her muffled yelps of pain. Occasionally he’d roll his eyes and utter a “Relax, babe, you’re lucky I’m not like some other guys,” but only if he was feeling particularly kind that day, only if she was so tense he couldn’t actually get inside her. Sometimes, if he was in a particularly good mood, he’d lick two fingers and slide them up her heat, pushing them as far as they could go before he took a rapid rhythm, something less about pleasure and more about getting her wet. He’d get her to cum on his fingers, he’d shiver slightly as he felt her fluids on his skin, then he’d slip the fingers into his mouth and suck her juices away.  
He used to love giving oral, but it just wasn’t the same for him with the mask on. 

Friday nights, she liked to stay in.  
It was when she had friends over.   
“It’s just a sleepover, Dad, you know how girls are,” she’d say, and he’d smile and nod and say “Of course, sweetheart, I’m so glad you’re making friends” and he’d kiss her on the forehead and pat her on the back—on top of a bruise that he’d probably forgotten he’d placed there. She was used to it, though, so it wasn’t hard to resist the urge to wince.  
She knew she’d have approximately six hours between her guest—or guests—arriving and her father returning, so she built a routine, and she stuck to it. Her routine was simple: wine and dine her guest, which in this case usually meant soda and pizza, perhaps warm her up with a movie—genre depending on her guest’s particular tastes—and then the next three hours were spent on her father’s bed, fingers and tongue deep in cunt, the bedroom echoing with moans and the sheets growing damp.  
At approximately 3:30 am, when they were still in the bedroom, she’d give a kiss goodbye, then refuse a second kiss when they’d reached the door to her house. Her father would return at around 4 in the morning, and he’d likely be so drunk that when he arrived in his bedroom he’d collapse onto his mattress and pass out. When he woke up and his bed smelled like sex, he just assumed it was himself. He’d wash his sheets, removing the evidence, and be none the wiser.

He’d stopped going out lately, though, and that interfered with her staying in.  
“Is something wrong, Dad? You're usually gone on Fridays,” Angel asked him as she nibbled on a piece of bread in the kitchen. His hair was a bit untidy, his shirt was rumpled and his belt didn’t seem to be in its usual notch. She briefly noted his unkempt appearance with a grain of measured alarm.   
The scowl on his face lightened, and he picked up a can of soda from the fridge instead of the whiskey he’d been reaching for.   
“Nothing’s wrong, pumpkin. Just a little tired of going out, you know?” He reached over and ruffled her hair. “Figured I could spend a night in with my little girl, if you’re not having anyone over.”  
She replied with a thin smile, though he’d never been good at reading faces, and the fact that she was his sweet daughter didn’t help. “No, Dad. I’d like that, I think.”  
He returned the smile—though it was hard to simulate sincerity while wearing a mask—and kissed her hairline before leaving the room.  
So she knew that something was amiss. She merely needed to find out what.   
Who, rather. Things never bothered him—things could be controlled, things could be solved by removal and replacement, things could be worked out with logic and solved, things only took some good thinking and a bit of time to figure out and there, that was it, it was over.  
 _People_ , however—people weren’t so easily controlled. A person couldn’t be figured out with logic; in fact, believing someone to be figured out spelled death if the assumption was incorrect. The only fail-safe solution was eliminating the person, but by now Jack had learned that this wasn’t Pandora, and that couldn’t be done so simply.   
So it was people that could gnaw at him, that could eat away at his brain until his lips were curved in a permanent snarl and his fingers curled like talons.   
And it had to be a woman, because though she was fairly certain her father appreciated his own sex to some extent, it was women who tortured him, who made him growl and ache. But who? It couldn’t be that one Ms. Moxxi—their affair was done and dead, and he’d moved on. He was still bitter, but that was unavoidable, and fairly harmless.   
So that night, after spending the evening staring at the television while her father read a book on the other side of the couch—spending time together, as they called it—she lay awake in her bed, flipping through potential subjects.   
But it could be anyone.  
There was an entire school full of girls on whom he could focus his desires, many of them she’d never seen, let alone interacted with.  
So she was about to fall asleep without a hope when she remembered how once she’d seen Carmen and Jack walking in the same hallway. There was nothing unusual about it at first glance: it had been between classes and the hall was packed with other students and teachers alike, but she remembered that he’d turned his head just slightly in her direction as he walked. He didn’t give two shits about anyone else in the room so it couldn’t have been coincidence. She frowned, and decided she would figured out a way to weasel it out of Carmen come Monday.


	4. Chapter 4

“Your dad’s kind of a dick, you know that, right?”   
Angel blinked at the question. But, she supposed, this made her job easier.  
“Where’s this coming from?” Angel replied, sitting beside Carmen at the cafeteria table.  
Carmen shrugged one shoulder, speaking with a mouth half-full of sandwich. “He tried to fuck me Friday after class.”  
It took her a bit of time to process that bit of information.  
“…Did he.”  
Carmen visibly reconsidered her statement as she finished chewing and swallowed. “Well, maybe ‘fuck’ is a bit overkill, but he shoved his hand down my pants and tried to get me to blow him. Fuck works, I guess.”  
Concern briefly diluted the intrigue that clouded Angel’s eyes. “You don’t seem particularly shaken up about it.”  
Carmen shrugged again. “I wasn’t particularly adverse to it. I just… I dunno. It didn’t feel right. It was too easy. Or it was for the wrong reason. Something.”  
“He wouldn’t let you be in control,” Angel murmured, only partially to the other girl.   
Carmen processed this as she swallowed another bite.   
“That sounds about right, I guess.”  
And Angel had a plan.  
“I can help you with that,” Angel eagerly said.   
Carmen raised her brows. “Help me bang your dad?”  
Angel waved a hand. “Besides that. More than that. I can help you rule him.”  
Carmen gave her a long look. “Angel, what aren’t you telling me?”   
Angel ignored the question. “We need to meet somewhere. Tonight. Somewhere busy, so no one will pay attention, but somewhere we can slip away.”  
At this point Carmen had figured she wouldn’t be getting any answers, so she sighed and said, “I don’t know, how about the food court at the mall?”  
“But it’s Monday, no one will be there.”  
“No one will be anywhere on Monday.”  
Angel rolled her eyes. “Fine, food court. Meet me there at six.”

They met over a plate full of slightly soggy fries—though Angel preferred them that way—and one large soda. They planned what Carmen would wear, how she would speak, act, every tiny glance and smirk and velvet laugh that would slip from her lips. For a long time, Jack would believe himself the victor, he would believe that he could take his well-earned prize at any time and in any place, and she was to confirm the illusion—but cut him off. Allow him a few strokes, a few breaths, but nothing more.  
“You’ve already been doing everything well,” Angel said, “You’re already a natural target for him. You just need to let him know that you’re not a target, but… be gentle.”  
“It’s not usually my style, but maybe I can make an exception,” Carmen returned, a grin teasing at her lips.   
“I’m not sure a ‘maybe’ is acceptable, Carmen,” Angel murmured, her hand settling above Carmen’s knee, her fingers teasing the inside of her leg. Carmen shifted in her seat, her knees angling further towards Angel.   
“This is why you wanted somewhere we could slip away, huh?” Carmen responded, approval ringing in her voice.  
“If we had to.” Angel slipped her hand up to curve over Carmen’s groin. “Should’ve told you to wear a skirt,” she muttered, then glanced back into Carmen’s green eyes. “But that would’ve made it too obvious.” She pressed two fingers against Carmen’s heat and the girl gasped, her thighs tightening around the hand between them.  
“Relax,” Angel murmured. “Don’t lose yourself. No matter what I do, you can’t show that I have you.” She unzipped Carmen’s jeans and slipped her fingers through the course hair she found. “You need to be in control, whether you’re compromised or not.” She found that, due to the restrictions of denim, her fingers could do naught more than settle on Carmen’s clit, much to her dismay. Carmen began to shift her hips to bring her jeans down, but Angel tsked her tongue. “If we do need to slip away, it wouldn’t do to have you incapable of escape, would it? This will have to do.”  
“So tell me,” she continued, “how many times has he had his hands on you?”  
“On me? I don’t know, lots. Unless you mean, like… on me.”  
“You know what I mean.”  
“Then just the once.”  
“How about his eyes, then?”  
Carmen shuddered slightly, though whether from the question or Angel’s fingers was unclear.  
“All the time. Even when he’s not looking at me, he’s watching me.”  
Angel frowned. He did the same to her, she knew. Not the mentally undressing bit, hopefully, but always he was aware of her, always he watched, as if she would turn on him in an instant, as if she’d smile at him and tear out his heart as he poured himself a glass of milk.  
Carmen continued speaking on her own, as if to distract herself from…well, herself.  
“His hands were rough,” she said, “As if he’d done a lot of manual labor.”  
Angel still said nothing. The skin on his hands was thick and calloused, yes, they were strong and vicious from life on Pandora, and she wasn’t quite sure if he’d yet managed to wash out all the blood and dirt from beneath those short and square fingernails.  
“We come from Pandora,” she murmured finally.  
“I know,” Carmen replied, her voice breathy.  
“It’s…not a nice place,” she continued, ignoring the other girl as her cheeks flushed and her legs clenched and she bit her lip so hard she almost broke the skin.  
Their eyes met.  
“You need work,” Angel said, withdrawing her hand, wiping it on a leftover napkin from the table, and leaving Carmen behind.


	5. Chapter 5

“You need work,” he said, tossing the datapad on his desk.   
“What do you mean I need work?” she replied, snatching the datapad and reviewing her code. “This works perfectly!”  
“Yeah, it works, but it’s not all about working. Those idiots out there in your class, they need to care about getting their crap to work. You, though, you need to worry about efficiency, you need your code to be elegant. Instead of telling to go from A to D to C to B, you need to get it to just go straight from A to B.”  
Carmen pouted. “Maybe I _want_ to go from A to D to C to B, hell, maybe I don’t even want to get to B, maybe I want to go to Q instead.”  
He stood up and began to walk towards her. “Wherever you’re going,” he said, bracing one hand on the back of her chair and the other on the edge of his desk, “I want to cut the crap and get straight there,” he growled.   
She blinked once, and calmly said, “So go there.”  
The corner of his sculpted lips lifted, and he cupped her chin, turning it just slightly towards him, but she didn’t look at him. He smoothed his palm down her neck and into her bra, cupping a breast and squeezing. He closed his eyes for a moment as he groped her, his thumb running over her nipple, then pinching it between his fingers. He never got very handsy with his escorts, there never seemed any point when all he wanted to do was spend himself and get back to his life.   
“Mm, no,” she said, “I think I like my way better after all.” She plucked his hand from her breast and stood up, straightening her blouse. “Besides, I think I want to go all the way to Z now, anyway.”

He was tired.   
It was Friday night, and he was sitting in his office with no light but the orange glow from his terminal, which glimmered in the smoke rings spewing from his lips.  
It was illegal to smoke indoors, but he was alone, and he really couldn’t give a damn.  
He let out a breath through his nose, he closed his eyes.  
He hated her.  
He hated the way she looked at him in the morning, he hated the way she looked at him in the afternoon, he hated her smile and her laugh and the way her hair fell down her back. He hated the color of her eyes and her laugh, the look on her face when he spoke to her.  
But oh, he loved her. When she brushed a lock of hair behind her ear as though it would clear her thoughts, the furrow in her brow when she focused, the way her skin felt under his fingers, the smell of her hair and the peace on her face when she slept, even if it was in class.  
He hated how he wasn’t sure if he was thinking of Carmen or Angel.   
Or did he love it?  
He frowned, shaking his head and opening his eyes, taking one last drag of his cigarette before putting out the end on his wrist, his nostrils flaring at the scent of singed hair. 

The heat built between them, they didn’t need light to guide their way.  
She was tied to the bed with Jack’s shirts, her head thrown back and her lips forming a perfect O as she cried out her pleasure, Angel’s pale brow coated with a sheen of sweat as her hand moved within the other woman’s heat.  
“You’ll wake the whole neighborhood,” Angel murmured as she raked nails down Carmen’s back and rained kisses on her.  
“Good,” came the reply, Carmen arching towards her lover as much as she could with her restraints. She let out another moan as Angel’s fingers reached deep within her, as she curled her hand and made a fist within her. Carmen let out a sigh as she relaxed her body and let the sensation take her.  
And usually Angel was ever stoic in her adventures, containing herself when desire consumed the women she lay with, when their sweat-covered bodies shivered and their chests heaved and muscles clenched, but she couldn’t help but feel a tingle in her spine as she looked at the body before her. She didn’t make a conscious decision to let her hand slip to Carmen’s breast, when she untied the fabric at one of the other girl’s wrists and slipped a hand in her hair to bring their lips together. Angel caught Carmen’s moans in her throat as their tongues danced, tracing teeth and memorizing taste as Angel’s fist continued its slight rhythm, as Carmen’s heat tightened and flexed and the blush left her loins and rushed to her face and her toes curled and—  
A third person stormed into the room just as she let out her final cry.  
“Get the hell away from my daughter!” he roared. They were temporarily blinded by the sudden light that filled the room, then Carmen let out a yelp of pain as Angel was torn from her.  
“Shit,” she muttered, then instantly regretting her choice in words.  
Fortunately—or not—he was currently focused on other things besides her language.   
When her eyes finally adjusted to the light, she saw him dragging Carmen out the room by her neck.   
She took a step forward and cried, “Dad, don’t!”  
But he only responded with, “You just stay right there, young lady! I’ll deal with you later.”  
Outside in the shadow of the side of their house, no one would notice them as long as he didn’t get too loud.  
“Who the hell do you think you are,” he snarled, gripping her hair and wrenching her head back, “To use my little girl like that? I should kill you right now for what you did, and if I were back on Pandora, I would get away with it.”  
She took a deep breath, noting how looked him square in the eye, and said, “Okay.”  
His nostrils flared. “I’m glad you agree,” he growled.  
“Of course I agree.” She tilted her head just slightly, a bit of her damp hair falling from behind her ear. Suddenly he noticed that she was still unclothed. “Jack, you’ve never been wrong before. I’m sorry.”  
He could take her, he thought, he could do it right now, he could strangle her while he fucked her and leave her body for the varren, he could pack Angel up and leave this place behind as nothing more than a second Pandora. He didn’t like staying in one place, anyway, he didn’t want Angel getting too attached because that was just unhealthy.   
And as he thought all this, as her fingertips hesitantly touched his chest, the pain returned, the twisting in his stomach, the hot knives that writhed through his thighs and for a moment it calmed him.   
Even he found it funny that pain soothed him, as though it were a mother shaking a newborn to make it stop crying, and just barely managed to keep from going too far. He closed his eyes as Carmen laid a light kiss on his bottom lip, let out a breath through his nostrils as she ran her fingers over his scalp, pulling at his hair, then dragging her nails down his neck along his jugular, leaving red marks in his flesh down to his collarbone. With every moment she touched him but didn’t touch him, his ache grew, and he wanted her more and he yet he didn’t.   
“I’ll kill you,” he said as she pushed him to his knees, “I’ll fucking murder you.” But as he sank and his vision was filled with nothing but the bronze of her skin he knew he might miss that soothing pain, and it only made him hate her more. 

Angel waited an hour before going outside to check on her father. She hesitantly peered out the front door, then checked around the house.   
“Dad?” she called when she made out the figure in the dark.   
“I thought I told you to stay inside!” he barked, but there was no more bite in his voice, and that worried her.  
“Are you all right?” she asked, but she knew he would not answer. He was clumsy as he stood, since he’d been on his knees for a while and his legs had surely gone numb. She didn’t bother offering her arm because he knew he wouldn’t take it; instead he clung to the side of the house for support, and it was all she could do but to walk just behind him and pretend not to notice.   
“Do you need anyth—”  
“Go to bed,” he muttered, and she nodded. It would do nothing to rouse him again, after all.   
He returned to the scene of the crime, as it were, and he gathered up the evidence: he picked up Carmen’s clothes, the shirts they had used, and the sheets of his bed, he took them out back and he burned them, at least careful to control the flames so as not to attract any unwanted attention. He placed two of his fingers on one of the latches of his mask as he stared into the flames. He finally sighed as he removed the mask and gingerly ran a hand over his face, his skin tingling from the sensation. For a moment he imagined how he looked flickering in the firelight, the blue mark branded across his face, then quickly stopped as he grew nauseated at the thought of ever having to see that scar again.   
When the embers quieted, he sighed, and put his mask back on, feeling like himself again. He stamped out the last few sparks, then returned to his bedroom, but found he wanted to be nowhere near the place. He resigned himself to the couch instead, with a bottle of liquor to keep himself company, though he hardly touched it. Instead, he stared out into the darkness, and he wondered where his Angel was.


	6. Chapter 6

She was watching him again.  
She’d started wearing red lipstick, and he didn’t even try to hide his staring, and she made him sick, and it made him ache, and he found that he needed her. Who was she, he thought, she was nothing but a girl, she’d been in the right place at the right time, she was only a mistake that he couldn’t erase, a problem he couldn’t throw out  
and what truly made him ill was that she stared back.  
Those green eyes boring into him like he owed her something, like she could see through him and into him and onto him and it made him squirm because he really hated the taste of his own medicine.   
A mist of sweat clung to the back of his neck, moisture under his mask and in the palms of his hands, somehow he felt that this was her fault, this was Angel’s doing, one had become two and two had become one in their corruption, this was their doing, this was her doing

his hands were shaking  
his office, he was clenching and reclenching his fists and resisting the urge to give in, or perhaps giving into the urge to resist he couldn’t remember anymore but she walked in and it was just her lips red and her hair black and her  
she held his gaze as she approached him and pulled off his belt and tied his wrists together behind the back of his chair  
her nails—did she sharpen them or maybe they were fake—dug into his wrists and he heard her exhaling his tension was so all-consuming she was blindfolding him and tugging his trousers down and then nothing for a while  
but then he heard her moaning.  
and the ache grew and he grew and he shifted and drew in a breath through his teeth and   
he felt fingers in his mouth, sweet fingers, he was tasting her, feeling her drip down his tongue and he couldn’t help but let a moan escape from his lips and he heard her smirk and her snort and god she hurt so good   
“Fuck me,” he growled,  
“Maybe,” she replied.  
but he felt her on him soon, and he was almost sad to feel his ache dissipate as her mouth worked him, slow as she was, and it was a minute before he’d realized that he’d finished and this time it was her tongue that was in his mouth, and this time he tasted himself, how bitter and sharp, how acrid and  
“You called yourself Handsome,” she said, and he hated himself for it.  
“You were a king,” she said, and he hated himself for it.  
“You disgust me” he heard, and he hated her for it.  
“She deserved more.”


End file.
